The Red Army crosses the pre-war Polish border

On the night of 3–4 January 1944 units on the right wing of the 1st Ukrainian Front, pursuing retreating German troops through the forests and marshes of Volhynian Polesie, crossed the former Polish–Soviet border, drawn by the Treaty of Riga in 1921, near the small town of Rokitno (Rokytne) in Sarny county. For the first time since September 1939 the Red Army entered an area that the Polish government in London, Poles at home and in exile and – formally – the Western Allies regarded as the territory of the Polish state.

War chronologies record that on this day the Red Army’s 1st Ukrainian Front “entered Poland”. The date agrees with Polish historiography, which takes precisely the night of 3–4 January as the moment the pre-war border was crossed, but it requires one qualification. The area was “Poland” in the sense of international law and of the Polish government, which never recognised the annexation of 1939. For the Soviet Union, Rokitno and the whole of Volhynia had been part of the Ukrainian SSR since November 1939, and in its view the Red Army was not “entering” any foreign state but recovering its own land. This gap – between the Riga border and the border of 1939 – shaped everything that happened in the weeks that followed.

Two borders

The border the Soviet troops crossed was the product of the Peace of Riga of March 1921, which ended the Polish–Soviet War. It left on the Polish side the Wilno region, western Belarus, Volhynia and Eastern Galicia, lands with a mixed population of Poles, Ukrainians, Belarusians and Jews. In Volhynia Ukrainians were a clear majority and Poles made up some 15 per cent of the inhabitants. The border was guarded by the Border Protection Corps (KOP), one of whose battalions was stationed in Rokitno itself.

On 17 September 1939 the Red Army crossed that border in fulfilment of the secret protocol of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (the Soviet invasion of Poland). After NKVD-controlled elections to the “People’s Assemblies” of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR incorporated the occupied lands into the Soviet Union. The Soviet–German border of 28 September 1939 ran roughly along the line the Allies had proposed in 1919 and 1920, which went down in history as the Curzon Line – with the difference that Białystok and Lwów (Lviv) ended up on the Soviet side.

After Germany attacked the USSR, the Sikorski–Maisky Agreement of July 1941 restored diplomatic relations and declared the Soviet–German treaties of 1939 invalid as regards territorial changes, but it deliberately left the question of the future border unresolved. The talks between Sikorski and Stalin in December 1941 (the Sikorski–Stalin declaration) also avoided it. In April 1943, after the Germans revealed the Katyn massacre and the Polish government turned to the International Red Cross, Moscow broke off relations with the Polish government. At the Tehran Conference at the end of November 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt accepted in informal talks, without the Poles taking part, that Poland’s eastern border would be based on the Curzon Line and that Poland would be compensated in the west at Germany’s expense. When Soviet soldiers reached the Riga border, neither the government of Stanisław Mikołajczyk nor the public yet knew the full extent of these arrangements.

The Zhytomyr–Berdychiv offensive

The entry into former Polish territory was a by-product of a great operation in right-bank Ukraine. After the liberation of Kiev in November 1943 and the end of the Battle of the Dnieper, the troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front under General of the Army Nikolai Vatutin beat off the German counter-attacks at Zhytomyr and Korosten that had marked the Eastern Front in mid-December 1943. On 24 December the front, supported by the Stavka representative Marshal Georgy Zhukov, went over to the Zhytomyr–Berdychiv offensive, which lasted until 14 January 1944. The main blow, involving the 1st and 3rd Guards Tank Armies, was aimed at Brusyliv, Zhytomyr and Berdychiv; the right wing advanced westwards through the wooded Polesie.

The German 4th Panzer Army, weakened by the autumn fighting, could not hold the front. Soviet troops took Korosten on 29 December, Zhytomyr on 31 December and, on 3 January, after two days of fighting, Novohrad-Volynskyi (Zviahel) – a town a dozen or so kilometres from the former Polish border. The same day an order of the Supreme Commander-in-Chief marked its capture with a salute in Moscow. On 4 January, on the front’s left wing, Bila Tserkva fell; Ludvík Svoboda’s 1st Czechoslovak Independent Brigade also fought for it.

On the right wing of the front was the 13th Army of General Nikolai Pukhov, which after taking Korosten and Olevsk was pushing west along the railway to Sarny. On this sector, with the help of Soviet partisan units that had been operating in the Polesie forests for years, the leading units entered the former territory of the Polish Republic on the night of 3–4 January. Sources differ slightly on exactly when Rokitno itself was cleared – local Russian studies give 2–4 January – and on which units got there first; they agree that it happened in the 13th Army’s sector of advance. On 11 January its troops took Sarny, the railway junction of the former Volhynian Voivodeship, and detached units reached the Horyn and the Styr, taking Włodzimierzec, Tuczyn and Kostopol. There, so as not to lose touch with the neighbouring front in Polesie, the army halted the advance of its main forces.

Volhynia in January 1944

The land the Red Army was entering had been devastated not only by the front. Under German occupation, as part of the Reichskommissariat Ukraine, the Germans had murdered almost the entire Jewish population of Volhynia in 1941–1942; in Rokitno itself the ghetto was liquidated in August 1942. From the spring of 1943 the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), the armed wing of the Bandera faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists, had been conducting a campaign to murder and drive out the Polish population, which culminated in “Bloody Sunday” on 11 July 1943. Historians most often estimate the number of Polish victims of the Volhynia massacres in Volhynia alone at 50,000–60,000; Polish reprisals cost the lives of, by estimates, several thousand Ukrainians.

The Poles who survived gathered in self-defence centres such as Przebraże or Huta Stepańska, in the towns and near German garrisons, or fled across the Bug. The forests held Soviet partisan formations, UPA units, Polish partisan units of the Volhynia District of the Home Army (PL) and the remnants of the German administration. Some Poles, seeking protection, joined German police battalions, which both Ukrainian and Soviet propaganda later exploited. For thousands of survivors of the massacres the arrival of the Red Army meant above all the end of the immediate threat from the UPA; for the Polish underground it raised the question of whether – and if so, on what terms – to reveal itself to the troops of a state that did not recognise the Polish border and had no relations with the Polish government.

Declarations from London and Moscow

The Polish government in London responded to the news that the border had been crossed with a declaration of 5 January 1944. It recalled that Poland had been the first to take up the fight against Germany, “without producing a single Quisling”, and demanded the earliest possible restoration of sovereign Polish administration in the liberated territories of the Republic. Invoking the Atlantic Charter and the treaties in force, it stated that their provisions could not be altered by faits accomplis. At the same time it reported that as early as 27 October 1943 it had instructed the underground authorities to continue and intensify the struggle against the Germans, to avoid conflicts with the advancing Soviet troops and to cooperate with Soviet commanders should Polish–Soviet relations be restored. Had an agreement preceded the crossing of the border, the government wrote, the Home Army could have coordinated its operations with the Red Army; it still considered such an agreement highly desirable.

The reply came on 11 January in a statement by the Soviet government, distributed by the TASS agency; Vyacheslav Molotov handed its text to the American ambassador, Averell Harriman, just after midnight. Moscow held that the Polish declaration contained “a number of untrue assertions”, including on the border: according to the statement, the Soviet constitution had fixed it in accordance with the will of the population expressed in the “plebiscite” of 1939, which had righted the wrong done to the Ukrainians and Belarusians by the Treaty of Riga. The USSR declared its wish to see a “strong and independent Poland”, proposed that Poland join the Soviet–Czechoslovak treaty concluded in December 1943, and stated that it did not regard the borders of 1939 as unalterable: they could be corrected in Poland’s favour in districts with a Polish majority, and the border would then run “approximately” along the Curzon Line. In the west Poland was to receive the “age-old Polish lands” taken by Germany and broad access to the Baltic. The statement praised the Union of Polish Patriots and the 1st Polish Corps in the USSR (PL) it had formed, and called the London government an “émigré” government, “cut off from the nation”, incapable of organising resistance at home and “not infrequently playing into the hands” of the occupiers.

Mikołajczyk’s government, under pressure from the British, who advised against open polemics, replied with restraint. In a declaration of 14 January, published the following day, it did not take up the question of the Curzon Line but proposed talks on all disputed issues through the British and American governments. On 17 January TASS announced that silence on the Curzon Line meant rejecting it, and that the USSR could not hold official talks with a government with which it had broken off relations “through that government’s fault” – because of its part in the “anti-Soviet campaign of slander” over Katyn. In the weeks that followed Churchill pressed the Polish government ever more insistently to accept the Curzon Line as the basis for an agreement; Mikołajczyk refused, unable to agree to give up Lwów and Wilno without the consent of the nation.

Operation Tempest in Volhynia

The underground at home had been preparing for this moment for several months. In November 1943 the Commander of the Home Army, General Tadeusz Komorowski “Bór”, issued the order for Operation Tempest (Burza): in the last phase of the occupation Home Army units were to strike at the retreating Germans, take control of the ground before the Red Army arrived and face it as hosts – representatives of the Polish Republic and allies – revealing their commands and the civilian authorities of the Government Delegation. The aim was to document Polish rights to the eastern lands and the Poles’ part in liberating them, despite the absence of diplomatic relations with the USSR. Some politicians and soldiers in London, headed by the Commander-in-Chief, General Kazimierz Sosnkowski, viewed revealing themselves to the Red Army with growing mistrust.

Volhynia became the first testing ground of the plan. The news that the border had been crossed prompted the district command to launch Tempest: mobilisation was announced on 15 January, and on 16 January the district commander, Kazimierz Bąbiński (PL) “Luboń”, ordered his units to concentrate in western Volhynia, around Kowel (Kovel) and Włodzimierz Wołyński (Volodymyr). Men from the self-defence posts joined the partisan groupings; mobilisation was hampered by the fact that the departure of the men stripped the bases where the civilian population had taken refuge. From these forces was formed the 27th Volhynian Infantry Division of the Home Army, numbering, according to various figures, between 6,000 and 7,000 men; from February it was commanded by Jan Wojciech Kiwerski “Oliwa”. The first battle against the Germans as part of Tempest was fought on 19 January near the village of Zasmyki; at the same time the division was fighting the UPA to widen its base.

Place in the war

The crossing of the Riga border opened the last chapter of the Polish–Soviet dispute over the eastern borderlands. At the front the Red Army pressed on: at the turn of January and February troops of the 1st Ukrainian Front took Równe (Rivne) and Łuck (Lutsk), and in the spring they fought for Kowel, where the 27th Volhynian Division cooperated with Soviet units. Encircled by the Germans in April, it lost its commander – Kiwerski was killed on 18 April – and broke out across the Bug. In July 1944, after marching into the Lublin region, it was disarmed by Soviet troops at Skrobów on 25 July, and its soldiers were drafted into Berling’s army, arrested or deported. The same pattern – cooperation in battle followed by disarmament and NKVD arrests – was repeated in July 1944 after Operation Ostra Brama in Wilno and after the fighting for Lwów.

Politically, too, the January exchange of declarations set the course. For the first time Moscow publicly and officially announced its programme: the Curzon Line in the east, German lands in the west, and as its partner not the government in London but the Union of Polish Patriots and the army subordinate to it. In July 1944, when the Red Army crossed the Bug, the Polish Committee of National Liberation came into being – created in Moscow, though announced as operating in Chełm – and in September it signed agreements with the Ukrainian and Belorussian SSRs on the “evacuation” of the population, the beginning of the expulsion of Poles from Volhynia and Eastern Galicia. At the Yalta Conference in February 1945 the Big Three agreed that Poland’s eastern border would follow the Curzon Line, with minor deviations in Poland’s favour. Rokitno, Sarny and the whole of Volhynia remained within the Ukrainian SSR and today lie in Ukraine.

For Poles, then, the night of 3–4 January 1944 was an ambiguous date: it heralded Germany’s defeat and the end of an occupation that had cost Poland millions of lives, but it also brought to Volhynia the rule of a state that in 1939 had joined Hitler in partitioning Poland and was now openly declaring that it would not give these lands back.